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Saturday, August 3, 2013

Past 52K & Still Rolling Along Quietly

With only about 6 months left of the two year lease, things have been getting a little quiet around here. I haven't been posting here as frequently and have instead been paying more attention to my BMW i3 blog because there has been so much news about the i3 lately. I haven't lost interest in the ActiveE and I still love driving it every day, but the newness has worn off a bit and realizing I was only "borrowing" it for 24 months I can't help but look forward to the car that the ActiveE was really designed to help refine for production, the i3. No more Trial Lease programs. I'll own my i3 and won't have to worry about a countdown 'till they take it back like I did with the MINI-E and now the ActiveE. Don't get me wrong, I've loved being involved in these programs. They have allowed me to drive great electric cars that were very rare, rack up as many miles as I wanted to and just hand back the keys without any worry of a mileage penalty. It's just now I'm getting ready to move on to what BMW has been working on all of this time; their first production electric vehicle, the i3.

I recently passed 52,000 miles on my ActiveE and recorded my 1,200th recharge. That's pretty intense usage for only 18 months of driving and no doubt the data BMW is getting from my car has been useful. That's really about 3 1/3 years of driving for the average US driver. By my calculations my battery has lost only about 8% of its usable capacity. This is well within reason for this amount of use and is encouraging to me for long term battery life, although I realize battery degradation is not perfectly linear.

Other than that everything has been pretty much status quo. The car is running fine, although I had to have the communications COMBOX replaced recently. That didn't effect my driving it at all, I just couldn't use the BMW Assist if I needed to while it was not working. It's interesting to me that I no longer have as many things to report on here because now that I know pretty much everything about the car, and reported the features here, it's just a regular car to me. That's a good thing though. It's just a car that I drive to work and to run errands. It's not some special, strange thing that people need to adjust to. EVs need to be "normal" for mass adoption.They can't be something that's filled with drama where there's always something interesting to write about. They just need to be reliable cars that do what's needed and allow the driver to enjoy the time they spend in them and the ActiveE is doing just that. In fact for meit's doing it very well. :)

Side Note: I was fortunate to be invited to the BMW i3 World Premier last week and did a blog post about it on my i3 blog. You can read about it HERE if interested.

2 comments:

There were unforeseen technical issues Johan. BMW is working to get it back up though. I just don't think it's a high priority unfortunately. I liked the idea of the forum, but in my opinion it just wasn't executed properly. It became a center for spam, not good ActiveE discussions. 90% of the members were just spam accounts. These forums can be very useful but they need to be constantly monitored to be effective.

I am the administrator of the BMW i3 forum and I watch it constantly and delete and ban any users that spam it. The ActiveE forum could have been much more effective with good oversight IMHO.